On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 3:33 AM, Peter Stuge <pe...@stuge.se> wrote: > > Rich Freeman wrote: >> This is really the crux of these sorts of issues. It doesn't matter >> if dependencies are static or dynamic - if you hang onto orphans then >> you're going to have cruft in your vdb which is going to lead to >> blockers of some kind eventually. > > I think the vdb can and should be updated according to portage changes. > > Someone just needs to code it. ;)
So, I'll agree that vdb should change when portage changes (and we should manage portage changes so that this can be done reliably), but we're talking about orphans here. Portage is only going to get one side of the story when dealing with an orphan. In your example of a package split the original package went away, and perhaps with some mechanism we could get portage to update all former dependencies to use both sides of the split. But, how about virtualization of a package? Your orphan depends on non-virtual udev, but now you want to install systemd which of course blocks udev. Maybe your package really does depend on the "real" udev (probably not a good example here - think ffmpeg instead perhaps), or maybe it can use the virtual. Just telling portage that the virtual replacement has been made is one problem, but figuring out whether to use it is going to be a wild guess for a PM. And there are likely other variations as well. Rich
